The present invention relates to pattern and cipher recognition, particularly where a hand-written character has been digitized and is presented in the form of a pixel matrix.
Known character recognition systems achieve accuracy by either placing restrictions on the writer or by requiring substantial computer processing time and/or memory. Current character recognition techniques typically include normalizing and thinning an image corresponding to a character before determining image representation. This typically requires use of an extensive database for template matching necessitating a memory consuming dictionary to find possible matches between the image and words. The computer resources required reduces the efficiency of these techniques in computers having limited computational power. Some techniques for recognition of hand-written characters necessitates formation of the characters with a predetermined sequence of strokes, often having predetermined start and end points. Other techniques require that characters be formed with a single continuous stroke. The aforementioned constraints associated with prior art hand-written character recognition techniques requires users to create characters unnaturally. This often increases the time required for a user to become proficient with a particular character recognition system. The user must become accustomed to the constraints and learn to create characters in accordance with the same.
What is needed, therefore, is a character recognition technique that substantially reduces the constraints imposed upon a user when creating characters.